Page 43 - bne_Magazine_March_2018

bne March 2018 Eastern Europe I 43
ing Denizbank, the Turkish lender it acquired in 2012 for $3.5bn. Its Ukraine business is also being offloaded to
local tycoon and former National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) governor Sergiy Tigipko at a significant loss.
Former Economy Minister and now Sberbank’s boss German Gref said that
The former saleswoman was eventually awarded £3.2mn after finding she
had been a victim of harassment, victimisation and discrimination amounting to constructive dismissal. Zaniboni and David Longmuir,
a banker who was also implicated in the case, have both since left the London business.
London business after it, like Sberbank, was sanctioned by the US and EU
over Russian military adventurism in Ukraine. bne IntelliNews also broke
the news in November that Russia’s UralSib had put its London unit up for sale. A sale of UralSib Securities to the emerging markets brokerage ITI Capital was finalised last year.
Not all Russia banks are decamping from Londongrad even as many of their Euro- pean, US and Chinese counterparts look to Frankfurt, Dublin and Luxembourg for new EU HQs.
VTB, Russia’s second-biggest lender,
has been tempering initial talk that Brexit may force its retreat from London. A Financial Times report in October cited VTB deputy chairman Herbert Moos
as saying the board was considering relocating its European HQ to an alternative hub, such as Frankfurt, Paris or Vienna.
Since then, however, VTB has been keen to damp speculation that it may be retrenching from the UK, In March, the bank even hired several senior bankers in London from both Deutsche Bank and J.P. Morgan.
“Sberbank’s boss German Gref said that sanctions have made the bank's life in Europe "extremely difficult”
sanctions have made the bank's life in Europe "extremely difficult” during an interview on state TV last year.
Kremlin-controlled lenders like Sber- bank have been subjected to sanctions by the US and EU since Russia fomented a separatist war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, barring them from raising capital with a maturity of more than 30 days
in western markets.
Sberbank, which controls about 46% of Russia’s deposits and a third of the nation’s loans, has had a torrid time in the UK over the past few years
but intends to stay the course. The business was cut to the bone following a quadrupling of losses in 2014 and
a record $5mn sexual discrimination award to Svetlana Lokhova, a former equity saleswoman.
Lokhova was thrust back into the spotlight last year after it emerged she had struck up a friendship with Michael Flynn, US President Donald Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, in her new role as a Soviet intelligence historian.
Lokhova was taunted by her London col- leagues with unfounded allegations of drug use and driven to a mental break- down, an employment tribunal ruled. She later passed a drug test taken at her insistence, while the tribunal ruled that then UK boss Paolo Zaniboni had victimised her by failing to discipline the London-based bankers who bullied her.
Sanctions do not prohibit clients from trading with Sberbank, but they do restrict investors from accessing debt and equity financing. To compound matters, many leading UK, European and US fund managers opted to sever trading lines entirely with Sberbank for fear of incurring the wrath of Wall Street regulators.
The number of employees at Sberbank's London office shrank last year to
30 from 37 for the prior year. Chief operating officer Adam Jesney was
“Sanctions do not prohibit clients from trading with Sberbank, but they do restrict investors from accessing debt and equity financing”
appointed as acting chief executive
last year following Zaniboni’s departure.
Gref told Bloomberg News in 2016
that investment banking is “not our strategy in the long term”, because it’s not growing as fast as the bank’s retail or corporate units. Gref has soured on investment banking since paying Arme- nian banker Ruben Vardanyan and his colleagues more than $1bn in 2011 for Troika Dialog. The business was later rebranded Sberbank CIB.
bne IntelliNews previously reported exclusively that Gazprombank, Russia’s third-largest lender, had wound up its
BSC Global Markets, the leading Russian brokerage on the Moscow exchange,
is keen to keep growing its London business from its location at the Tower 42 office block.
“Let’s wait and see how the chips fall,” Luis Saenz, head of equity sales and trading at BCS in London old bne IntelliNews. “We think it’s too soon to tell how things pan out to make any decisions now.”
www.bne.eu